5 Learnings from Facebook's 1st Senior Software Engineer

I really thought this interview with Karel Baloun on the Internet History Podcast was super helpful for church leaders. So many great learnings, but five stand out:

 
 
  1. Never get okay with your success. Always be up for change. Myspace didn’t change their site for a long time and that was the death of their community. 
  2. Think of the users first. Serve your users. See what they want. Listen to the overall community and not the angry people only. Mark is amazing at listening to the Facebook community.
  3. Focus on features that get more people on the site and build real community. Photo tagging is a perfect example of adding true value and growing the numbers of users. 
  4. Track the right data for success. Facebook users spent a great deal of time early on by going to friends profiles and out of this data came the personal Newsfeed.
  5. Be okay with failure by being fast, fluid, and flexible. Many features and standalone apps failed (Poke App & Wirehog) but those crashes were reincarnated into future projects.